Dependent Independents -- Residency @ Campbelltown Arts Centre

Dependent Independents is a work of performance-in-research that calls out not only the performative tropes of research but also those of any in dependent practice at large, both of w/c deploy & are immersed in the vocabulary of administration.

A 3-week creative-research residency at Campbelltown Arts Center in Australia, from 10-29 October 2011, is spent filling up the 3-week duration w/ exchanges among artist-administrators that unveil the very conditions that sustain & make possible such a 3-week residency among various residencies in the world of variable durations w/c subsist on a growing economy of cultural exchange & the accumulation of social capital.

In residency is Filipino choreographer-curator Donna Miranda, joined by Filipino poet-critic Angelo V. Suarez, to discuss w/ Australian dance artists Dean Walsh, Nikki Heywood, Matthew Day, Sam Chester, & Alexandra Harrison the material conditions that necessitate the construction of a site of/for art-making that characterizes itself as "independent"--a process that inadvertently produces new modes of dependence on institutions that project themselves as less institutional & more nomadic.


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How we arrived at this? Is pretty much obvious insofar as the grammar of producing in our time has prescribed. Still it remains unarticulated. Perhaps because autonomy and its ideological identification with the refusal to work -- it, being the dynamics of interdependency involved in independent practice; it, being the material conditions we often talk about if only to refer to its lack, and it, being the self-identification label most of us (independent) practitioners wear with pride -- often blur itself with misplaced notions of emancipation instead of self-sufficiency.

Or perhaps we are often more caught up in the routinely habit of switching roles, fitting hats and juggling time than mapping the coordinates of a terrain that is the independent practice, or terrain of our independence, or simply just of independence from 'x'because there's simply no time. And even in those platforms where practitioners meet as artist-slash-managers to discuss and share stories of their hand-to-mouth existence rarely have those administrative roles and tasks, including the constant movement between those two zones, been remotely considered for work -- both in the sense of proper work as in paid labor, or even work as in proper work in/of art.

That this residency looks at the movement of independent practitioners between institutions and the independent -- "to challenge and explore the existing thinking and practices around the context of working as an independent artist both inside and outside 'institutions'" -- that it is only but fitting to point out the variations of unaccounted labor involved in producing a work and make a work out of it. Be that in the means of doing work, creating work, presenting work, talking about work, planning work, planning periods of work, talking about work, organizing work, working on work, and distributing work. And whether it is the administration of these seemingly menial endeavors that may be considered choreographic insofar as it involves a rhythmic arrangement and coordination of bodies, people, space, time, resources and protocol or the choreographer who mimics an administrator's meticulous proficiency in conducting bodies, people, space, time, resources and protocol is not as consequential as underlining that in the aesthetic regime of artistic production, the "identification of art no longer occurs via a division within ways of doing and making but based on distinguishing a sensible mode of being specific to artistic products (Ranciere, 2009)."

And so it has been agreed...